


The Ocean Around Your Skin

by Pennin_Ink



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Acting, Alternate Universe - Human, Basically this is stuff that makes me happy, Deleriuosly happy, M/M, Merman Stiles, Modelling, Multi, Ocean Conservation, Performance, Professional Mermaids, Prosthetic/Artificial Mermaid Tails, Scuba Diving, Sharks and Dolphins and Rays and Whales and other good stuff, So much ocean-love here, Vanity Project, With A Twist, sea creatures - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-02-08
Packaged: 2018-01-10 16:37:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pennin_Ink/pseuds/Pennin_Ink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles Stillinski, owner of StyleFin LLC, is a professional merman. He swims in artificial tails for magazine ads, music videos, commercials, and most importantly, for promotional work that supports his friend Scott's ocean conservation group. With the help of engineer Lydia Martin, Stiles is growing more and more famous for his hyper-realistic tails as well as his beautiful underwater performances.</p><p>Derek and Laura Hale run a salvage operation, diving to sunken ships to retrieve whatever valuables, machinery, or potential pollutents they can remove. Laura decides to use her connections as Stiles' former diving instructor to bring him out to film around one of the wrecks in exchange for plugging the salvage operation in his videos. Derek, being the younger sibling, is naturally stuck with the job of showing Stiles and his friends around.</p><p>He just never expected to fall for a merman, professional or otherwise, and he certainly wasn't prepared for the kind of high-profile, very public, life that Stiles leads.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Let me begin by saying that this is a total vanity project. I literally write this to unwind and cheer myself up. This is a relatively low angst story, and it's primarily an excuse for me to geek out over some of my all-time favorite things: professional mermaiding, and the ocean.
> 
> So each chapter is basically a way for me to show off one or more aspects of these worlds that I adore so much. Whenever applicable, I'll include author's notes at the end of a chapter explaining something I drew on for inspiration. Hope you have fun playing along!

When Stiles swims, he slices through the water. He shoots forward like a torpedo, leaving a trail of air pockets and disturbed water in his wake, and he is at once clear-headed and hyper-aware of his own body. Maneuvers are tricky; movement has to be precise or he’ll end up floundering, but by now his body knows how to navigate the strange half-falling, half-flying experience of being in water, and he can almost swim on auto-pilot.

Almost. There are still some tricky moves he has to learn. Kicks are harder now, with the extra weight and length to compensate for, but he needs to get the motion down so he skims the surface, pulling a few corkscrews as he glides just to get his momentum going. There’s power behind his feet, more than he’s used to, and he wants open water to try breeching like whales do, maybe even a few jumps if he can pull them off without giving Scott a heart attack. He knows the kind of swimming he _wants_ to do, and these days it seems like the kind of swimming he _can_ do is getting closer and closer to the stuff he sees in his head.

He’s got his momentum going, now. He’s got a feel for the shape and size of his body in the water. So with one almost lazy forward flip, he straightens his legs, overextending even as he pushes forward, bringing up his knees much, much harder than he used to and he can suddenly _feel_ the extra pull of gravity as his toes come out of the water, a mass of patterned scales and ridged fin following them into open air before coming back down with a loud _smack_ and a splash Stiles can hear even underwater.

He surfaces with a whoop and a victory punch in the air with one hand while he pushes his wet hair out of his eyes with the other.

“What the hell?”

Stiles freezes, starts to sink, and frantically begins to tread water, swaying his tail back and forth to keep himself buoyant. He swings around carefully until he can see the boat he’d managed to completely miss.

It’s a battered old tub with an outboard motor and a heavyset, bearded white man leaning curiously over the rowlocks. He’s wearing a floppy fisherman’s hat and Stiles can see the long pole of a fishing rod poking up behind him. This isn’t exactly prime fishing time in the cove, but it’s not the first time some old guy intruded on Stiles’ practice while trying to escape domestic life.

“You have a tail.” Fisherman Bob tells him.

Stiles is tempted to say, _Oh my god, really? Where did_ that _come from?!_ But he keeps his mouth shut and just nods.

“That, uh, that ain’t real, is it?”

Well it’s real silicon, real neoprene, and _definitely_ real work to put together. But Stiles has done this dance enough times to know how it plays out. He stifles a sigh and tells Fishy McGee that no, the tail is not real. He refrains from adding that that’s just what a real merman _would_ say if some responsibility-dodging piscitarian barged in on his “me” time, because the last time he did that he nearly ended up in a net.

Not a happy memory.

“Huh. Okay. So why you wearin’ it?”

“I’m a stunt swimmer.” Stiles lies. Though it’s not _totally_ false, stunt swimming is a big _part_ of what he does, but “professional merman” isn’t exactly the kind of job title people can latch onto at ten a.m. on a Sunday. “I gotta test the rig before I go on camera.”

“Rig”, he’s learned, is a good layman buzz word for putting the uninitiated at ease. He often wishes he could own his mer-life like some of the others do. Allison, who he works with the most, has mermaid business cards she hands out to everyone she meets with the words “model” and “actress” in fine print at the bottom. She refers to all of her prosthetics as “her tails” and flaunts her lifestyle at every opportunity.

Stiles does, too, but he has a few choppier waters he needs to navigate. Like pre-modern boat types with access to fishing nets and harpoons. There...may have been an incident. Or two. He ended up in the hospital once.

“This is for some kinda movie?”

Stiles shakes his head. “Commercial. Some island resort.” The spot he filmed last month for the Midas Resort and Spa will premier in a few weeks, so it’s not an entirely unfounded lie.

“Ah, pullin’ in the ladies, right?”

He’s saved from explaining himself any further by the buzzing sound of Scott’s zodiac rushing up behind him.

“Stiles! That was insane, I couldn’t even keep up with you!”

“You can never keep up, buddy.” Stiles shoots back.

“You with him?” Mr. Fishybritches asks Scott, jerking a thumb at Stiles.

Stiles doesn’t roll his eyes. At least, not while the guy can see him. Scott just puts on his PR smile and introduces himself as Stiles’ agent. Which he is. Occasionally.

“We’re actually on a pretty tight schedule right now, though.” Scott says with a perfect apology face, like he really can’t think of anything he’d rather be doing than hanging out with sun-wrinkled white guys in boats. This is why Scott handles bookings and scheduling conflicts. Stiles is rarely capable of reaching the end of a conversation without pissing someone off.

FishyBob nods what he probably thinks is sagely and waves them away. Scott turns his grin up a few hundred watts and produces a modified jetski handlebar on a rope for Stiles to hold onto. The other end is secured to the floor of the craft, so all Stiles has to do is hold on while Scott motors gently away, keeping his speed down so Stiles won’t lose control of his tail and tangle the fluke in Scott’s propeller.

That, at least, is an issue they’ve never actually had. Stiles aims to keep it that way, especially since Lydia quoted his latest tail design to be worth more than $5,000. After which Stiles may have fainted. Briefly.

Lydia herself is waiting for them on the dock. The sun is high enough in the sky that it sets her strawberry blonde hair on fire, and Stiles is struck, not for the first time, by the way she looks more like a mermaid than any of the women he swims with. She’s tiny, curvy, sinuously strong, and Stiles falls a little in love with her every time he sees her.

“How’d the tail perform?” She asks before Stiles’ head is even fully clear of the water.

“Takes some getting used to.” Stiles admits. “It doesn’t move as freely as my other tails.”

Lydia shakes her head. “No, that’s the point. Fish bodies aren’t nearly as floppy as mermaid tails usually look. It’s a semi-rigid structure, that gives it its power.”

Stiles crosses his arms on the wood of the dock, swishing his tail to help him stay buoyant. “It’s not as good for performances, though.”

“The down-kick will wow them where the bend doesn’t. Besides, you know how I feel about your knobby kees poking through the material. It kills the illusion. It makes it too obvious you’re a human in a costume; we want people _believing_ you’re a merman, not just going along with it.”

“Yeah, I get that. Trust me. But we gotta work on the sit. The dorsal ridge makes it hard enough but you can’t get a decent curl in this thing. If a model can’t sit on a rock and tuck this tail beside them, we can’t use it for photoshoots or beach scenes.”

“And it’s too heavy and complex to be a sport tail.” Scott points out. “That limits it to dive work only, and it’s a pretty big investment for not a lot of use.”

Lydia pinches the bridge of her nose and huffs. “Look, the videos are the money-maker. People see you swim on YouTube and they get interested. Your fanbase _lives_ on YouTube. What I’ve done is create the most biologically plausible prosthetic tail on the market. You won’t get a better swim than this, and that means you can’t get better video footage with any other tail.”

Stiles adjustes his ab muscles, locking his legs inside the tail and letting the water push him up so the ridge that hides the seam where the two sides come together is just peeking up out of the water. He gives an experimental flex of his knees and toes, and watches a good two feet of tail and fluke rise straight out of the water before splashing back down.

The tail extends more than a foot past his pointed toes before it becomes the fin, allowing some mechanical mojo of Lydia’s to hide the fact that he has heels, while simultaneously turning all of his upward kicks into downward strokes like a whale or a dolphin. It’s something human legs can’t do, and for years he had to try and compensate for his human anatomy by learning how to swim like a noodle, and he _still_ looked like a boy in a merman costume.

Even better, Lydia rigged up something with his toes that lets him lock the fluke in place when he wants to, so he can control the movement of his tail past the point where his feet end rather than just dragging the fin and a length of tail behind him like dead weight to flop around all useless-like and kill his body line.

“I’ll admit I like controlling the fin.” He says. “And there’s some serious power behind this thing. I bet I can breech with it.”

“Do you think you can jump?” Lydia asks, and Stiles could kiss her.

Scott goes pale. “What? No! Stiles, you are _not_ going to try to _jump out of the water_ like a freaking dolphin, okay? I don’t care how good Lydia’s fins are, you can’t build up that kind of momentum and you’re gonna end up knocking the wind out of yourself. Then what are you gonna do?”

Stiles shrugs. “Drown?”

“Stiles!”

“Okay, okay! I won’t jump, jeeze.”

He’s totally gonna jump. Just...not when he’s alone. Never dive alone, first rule of SCUBA and, it turns out, mermaiding. His diving instructor drilled that into his head on day one, before he even _touched_ a BCD.

“We need to do a camera test before we make a final decision, but I’m submitting a tentative yes.” Lydia says, dragging them back on topic. “As long as there are no obvious defects on video, I’d say we can premier this tail at the next shoot.”

“What about Allison?” Scott asks, carefully keeping his face blank. Stiles doesn’t miss the tiny upward curve of his mouth, though.

“What do you mean?” Lydia asks.

Stiles jumps in. “Well it’s the loggerhead turtle hatching.” He points out. “Allison never misses it. We wanted to film it together, but if I’ve got this tail and she’s still wearing the silicon sock model, it’s going to be _really_ obvious.”

“We could chalk it up to sexual dimorphism, maybe?” Scott suggests.

Lydia rolls her eyes. “Please.” She sneers. “Okay, Scott, get Chris on the phone and see if you can confirm a joint production. If we can set a date and a plan, I can take Allison’s cast and make her her own version of the new tail. We’ll premier them together, the male and female models, then we can post them on the site made-to-order to collectors.”

“Since when do we sell performance tails?” Scott asked.

“Since the price tag is going to drive away all but the most dedicated mermaids, and since letting Allison have one even though she’s not in our company means we need to make them available to _all_ performers or we risk alienating potential contacts. Besides, all those heels poking out of everyone’s videos piss me off. The sooner we can spread this design around, the better. Besides, I already applied for the patent. We’ll post the sale as soon as it clears.”

“You realize I’m not giving up my sport models.” Stiles says. “Heel problem and all. I can get into those by myself in twenty minutes any time I feel like a swim.”

Scott arches his eyebrows. “You do know you can swim _without_ a tail, right?”

Stiles pulls a face and splashes him. Scott giggles and dances away on the dock, where Stiles can’t reach him.

“I’m not saying it’s a perfect design.” Lydia says, the _yet_ hanging unspoken in the air. “But it’s the best we’ve got for publicity. The aquariums are going to eat it up.”

Stiles grins at that. He loves aquarium work. He does some of his best performing in aquariums, where he can improv as much as he likes, and they only ever accept contracts from places that meet Scott’s rigorous standards of care for the animals, so he also gets to boost business for the good guys on top of it all.

They spend the next couple of hours filming Stiles in the tail. Scott busts out his wet suit and SCUBA gear while Lydia climbs into the zodiac to check the feed from Scott’s underwater camera on her monitor. To everyone’s delight, the tail _feels_ a lot more rigid than it actually is, and they get some beautiful curviture as Stiles spins and circles and corkscrews through the water. Lydia’s right; it _is_ beautifully organic, and the down-kick from Lydia’s extension changes the game entirely.

Stiles could almost believe he really does belong in the ocean. Like he really was born for this.

Like he’s something magical.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note*
> 
> Lydia's tail extender is based loosely on a similar system utilized by special effects artist Jason Baird, who designed and built the tails for Australian TV series H2O: Just Add Water and Mako: Island of Secrets, both available on Netflix.
> 
> The Byrd tails are built around a semi-rigid shell made of neoprene, the stuff used to make cold-water wetsuits. The shell is shaped into a fish-like musculature to disguise the outline of human legs, like the sharp bend of the knees and the widening of the shins. The heels are disguised by wrapping them in neoprene and attaching them to a flexible wooden rod which connects to a custom-built wooden frame that makes up the base of the fluke, about a foot and a half below the feet. 
> 
> With the tail extender, the actor doesn't need to flex their feet to make the fluke point down. Gravity and the drag of the water pull the fluke downward every time the actor kicks up, creating an uninterrupted, sinuous line from fingertips to fluke, best seen here: 
> 
> http://mermaid-myth.tumblr.com/post/63129203180
> 
> Unfortunately the semi-rigid frame means that you can't have the waistline of the tail lie flush against the actor's skin, leaving the waist free to swivel about inside and make a very, VERY obvious seam where the waist and the tail meet. Fortunately, through the power of FICTION, I can make Lydia figure out a way to fix that, as well as a way to keep the unsupported part of the tail from drooping when not in motion.
> 
> While Byrd's designs are beautiful and the resulting motion breathtaking, there are some serious drawbacks. For one, they're cumbersome to put on. They need to be assembled around the actor's body, with the back partially split like a banana, and then the two pieces joined beneath a stylized dorsal ridge meant to conceal the seam. I kept that part, especially since Byrd's team have gotten better at hiding the crack so it doesn't look quite so much like a zipper as it did in the early seasons of H2O. 
> 
> Beyond that, they're heavy and very hard to transport. For that reason, professional mermaids tend to work in silicon or neoprene body-hugging fabric tails which don't disguise the shape of the legs, the bend of the knees, or the jut of the heel and therefore can never really look convincingly organic. They are, however, lighter, easier to travel with, MUCH easier to get into, and offer a much wider range of motion for the performer. Stiles has a very large collection of these tails, which he calls "sport tails", and which are modelled after the creations of MerTailor Eric Ducharme. More about him in later chapters.


	2. Chapter Two

Derek Hale _hates_ the movie _Jaws_. 

And his big sister, Laura, _knows_ he hates it. That he always has hated it, ever since he first watched it on their Uncle Peter’s big houseboat when he was ten. Of course, by then he’d already been swimming with black tips and lemons and dogfish, even came within spitting distance of a hammerhead once, and he knew first hand just how vicious and monsterous sharks _weren’t_.

Which is why, every single time, Laura announces an incoming shark by humming the theme song into his earpiece. No matter how many times he’s poured chum into her wetsuit. He’s given up by now.

It’s just a blue shark. Not even a great white. Derek rolls his eyes and floats placidly as the shark swims on by. He recognizes it from yesterday, when he’d first started scouting this particular wreck. He calls it Telulah, in the privacy of his own head, because Laura would never let him live it down if she found out he’s been naming the wildlife. 

Telulah looks right at him, just like she did yesterday, and drifts away. Derek isn’t even remotely prey-shaped, and the ship’s been down here long enough to start supporting an ecosystem, so she’s not exactly hurting for food. There are even some lobster scurrying around some thirteen feet below his flippers, and Derek remembers seeing some cuttlefish yesterday.

Derek leaves her to her drifting, and she leaves him to his snooping. Eventually Laura gets bored and stops humming, and Derek spends several minutes twisting and slithering his way through the remains of the ship until his gauge tells him to surface.

Derek takes his ascent carefully, passing Telulah a dozen or so yards away as he does.

“ _Meet me in the cabin when you get up._ ” Laura says into his earpiece. “ _I need to talk to you about something_.”

Derek is instantly suspicious. Laura’s employed this tactic before. She’ll go through the whole day, scheduling, navigation, and prep, totally normal. Then as soon as Derek’s had a nice, long dive, right when he’s good and relaxed, she’ll hit him with some horrible news. Usually something involving tourists who he’ll have to babysit to keep them from breaking off hunks of coral.

Derek takes his time getting onto the boat, lingering over his flippers like he couldn’t get them off in his sleep, then climbing the ladder at a leisurely pace and devoting way more time and attention to removing his BCD than he needs to.

Briefly, he wonders if he can get away with waiting for the goggle-lines to fade from his face before going inside, but he can practically _taste_ Laura’s impatience with him as it is, so he heaves a sigh and enters the cabin where Laura is standing with her arms crossed and her lips pursed in irritation.

“I’ve seen you prep for a dive in two minutes flat and now it takes you half an hour to get out of your gear?” She demands.

“The bends?” He suggests, and she slaps him upside the head, scattering droplets of water all over the place.

“Not. Funny. Asshole.” She says. “Now come here.”

She takes a seat in front of her laptop with its stupidly expensive internet connection hooked up to the side. Derek sighs, brings his towel up to his head, and goes to stand beside her so he can see the screen.

“Remember when we lived in California? Back when I was giving dive lessons?” Back before they had enough to put a down payment on the boat, back when walking on solid ground felt normal.

Derek nods. “So?”

“So I had this student. He was only in high school at the time, but he and his friend were the best in the class.”

Derek frowns. “Wait, was he the kid with the floppy hair who was always helping you put stuff away when I came to pick you up?”

Laura shakes her head. “No, that was his friend, Scott. Stiles was the one with a buzz cut who--”

“Couldn’t talk without moving his hands. Right. Yeah, I remember those kids.”

“Yeah, well. Not kids anymore. Check it out:” And she maximizes a window with a web page on it, a blue undersea background with a rippling pearl white logo for a company called  StyleFin LLC, and below it isa large photo of a young man in a fake mermaid tail swimming in open water.

“Stiles Stillinski.” Laura announces. “All grown up and putting those kicks to good use. He’s a professional merman.” She grins and looks at Derek expectantly.

Derek arches an eyebrow. “What does this have to do with us?” He asks.

Laura straightens, suddenly all business though she’s still smiling like a kid on Christmas. “Well, I was looking through his videos and there’s a couple of him swimming around a wreck.” She navigats through a few pages until the video, embedded from YouTube, pops up.

“Look at it. It’s barely five years old.” She gestures to the screen.

Derek looks. It is, indeed, a pretty modern shipwreck, all things considered. There’s a token effort from the surrounding sealife to claim it, but for the most part it’s still very much a ship, and not a huge one.

“So I was thinking, we see better wrecks than that on a weekly basis. We could definitely show him around some really good old ones and he could film there.”

“Why?”

Laura rolls her eyes. “ _Publicity_ , Derek. We can’t live on word-of-mouth forever. We need to pull in new clients and to do that we need people to know who we are. Stiles’ videos get an average of eight hundred _thousand_ views a piece. And that’s just in the first twenty-four hours. I figure we take him out, he films a video, puts our company name at the end and voila!”

“And how much do we pay him for all this?”

Laura shrugs. “I suggested a standard tour to see what he thinks and we’ll work out all the details during negotiations if he says yes.”

“Suggested? As in you already talked to him?”

Laura stands and pats him on the shoulder. “Relax, kiddo.” She teases. “It’ll be fun! Just think, you’ll get to swim with a merman!”

She snatches up her laptop and heads out the door, toward her lounge chair on the forward deck.

“He’s not a merman!” Derek calls after her, then immediately decides it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever said, and drops his head in his hands.

 

Stiles Stillinski’s YouTube page pops up with a pre-selected video titled, “Splashing in Style: An Introduction to Merman Stiles Stillinski”. Derek clicks on it, and the first shot shows an older version of Laura’s old teacher’s pet lying in bed, tossing and turning while the video intercuts with footage of a full moon shining on dark water.

Someone on Stillinski’s team clearly knows a little about editing, because when Stiles opens his eyes they’re doctored to look like there are tiny moons where the irises should be. Stiles gets up, moving like he’s been hypnotized, and the next cut shows him from the waist up, walking on a sandy beach.

The camera plays coy, never dipping below Stiles’ navel, except for one sillhouette shot of him curling forward to dive into the water. After that there are a lot of close ups of his face, shots of a silvery coral reef, and a surprisingly yet not jarringly up-tempo music track. The editor shows off their skills again, and Stiles’ skin is partially concealed by a combination of wake bubbles and light wavers until the image resolves and Stiles is sporting a dark, fish-like tail dappled in white or silver, in a pattern that reminds Derek of some of the rays he’s seen.

To Derek, and probably to anyone who’s ever seen a fish, it’s obvious the tail is fake. You can see the slope of his thighs toward his knees, and the flare of his calves before they taper to his ankles. And his heel is glaringly obvious every time he angles himself downward. But it doesn’t matter.

Stiles swims like he owns the water, or like it owns him. He moves in one sinuous undulation from the tips of his outstretched fingers to the shimmery edge of his fluke. His face is perfectly serene, with no hint to the discomfort of holding his breath, like he can simply stay below the surface all day if he wants to, like breathing is something that happenes to other people.

He’d grown his hair out, too, though Derek prefers not to notice that he noticed that.

He looks down at the stats for the video. It’d been watched just over a million times, noticeably more than any of the others on his channel, and Derek figures it’s his primary marketing material.

He lookes back at the video, where Stiles is pulling himself up onto the sand, now brightly lit like he’d been swimming all night and into the day. Stiles drags himself out of the water, then flips over onto his back, breathing heavily with his arms and chest caked with sand. He lifts his head to look down at his tail, then lets it fall back down again, landing heavily on the sand beneath him.

Derek smirks. Not too bad a video, all things considered, but that was only the first four minutes. There’s another quarter of an hour to go.

The performance part fades out, replaced by a very human stiles squinting at the camera in front of a beach. Possibly the same one.

“ _I always loved swimming, I mean it was like my favorite thing to do when I was a kid. Mermaids didn’t really factor into it until around high school, though._ ”

The video cuts to still shots of Stiles in a series of tails, some ameteurish and clumsy, other sleek and organic looking like the one in the performance. Stiles keeps talking thorugh the slideshow in a voice over.

“ _My mom died when I was eight. I kind of lost it for a while, and my dad just started sort of throwing me at all these sports and activities to try and, y’know distract me or help me channel some of it out. And I guess swimming was the only thing that really took._ ”

There’s a new slideshow of a very young Stiles in swim trunks inhabiting various public and private pools, often with a boy Derek recognizes as an equally young Scott beside him, and then the footage cuts back to Stiles on the beach.

“ _It was actually my best friend, Scott, who kinda got me started down the whole...mermaid path._ ”

Scott replaces Stiles on the screen, sitting in a chair next to a large cement enclosure full of splashing water. There’s a flash of fin from a spinner dolphin, and Derek recognizes some large ocean-specific veterinary supplies stacked neatly behind him.

“ _In high school I was working as an assistant to our local vet, who was moonlighting as a volunteer with some marine rescue groups. He started taking me along to some of his jobs and I just...fell in love._ ” Scott’s face lights up with a smile. “ _So naturally I dragged Stiles along with me. I mean we did everything together so, why not this?_ ”

Stiles comes back on camera, this time with Scott by his side, hanging off of his shoulder with thoughtless ease.

“ _I got really interested in the way the animals moved, and I started trying to mimic some of those movements when I was swimming. One thing kind of led to another and we both took SCUBA classes. Once we were certified I just kept taking it further until, y’know, by the time graduation rolled around I had five different hand-made tails and Scott was co-founding a conservation start-up with his boss. It all...kinda came together._ ”

The footage switches to video of Stiles and Scott, along with other members of their team, testing out tails and having photoshoots and filming videos while a female narrator explained StyleFin’s partnership with Clarion Conservation Group and all of the charity and awareness work they do together to protect ocean wildlife. It is, Derek has to admit, pretty fascinating stuff. And Stiles does have a definite presence in the water, especially when he’s swimming with another professional mermaid identified in the video as Allison Argent. They have a knack for expressing themselves in the water that reminds Derek of some pods of dolphins he’s seen. There’s the same sense of playful giddiness in the way they interact with the water.

He watches through the end of the video, with interviews from the conservation group founder, Alan Deaton, Stiles’ engineer and design partner Lydia Martin, and several other professional mermaids who work with Stiles and Clarion from time to time. When it’s over, he just sits for a while, thinking.

He gets why Laura is so excited about this idea. They both love the unique beauty of the ocean, how it’s like moving through an alien world, and Stiles seems to embody that kind of fascination. He just isn’t sure if it’s worth the effort to drag him and his crew out to one of the more photogenic wrecks on the off chance of stirring up some publicity.

On the other hand, Derek has never swum with a merman before, and according to the video Stiles can hold his breath for over four minutes. That kind of freediving would be pretty cool to watch. After a moment, he decides to check out more videos, to get a better idea of what to expect from this little experiment.

The newest one has a thumbnail with a picture of Stiles in a sleek blue tail cut through with a yellowish stripe that looks a lot like the markings on a common dolphin. Derek clicks on it, and Stiles appears on screen, two-legged and standing in what looks like a studio.

“ _Hey guys, it’s merman Stiles here. I’m giving you all a sneak preview of my new tail._ ”

The video changes to Stiles swimming in shallow ocean in the new tail, a SCUBA diver with him and presumably another holding the camera. The video doesn’t last long, but it’s enough to see that the tail is much longer than the one in the other video, and moves more like a dolphin tail than two human legs strapped to a monofin.

Back to the studio, Stiles resumes talking.

“ _As you can see, Lydia and I have been hard at work developing new designs, and there’s some pretty exciting stuff coming up. Now, we’re going to premier this tail fully in two weeks at the loggerhead turtle hatching in Florida. Details are in the description. So if you want to come check us out, that’s great, but keep in mind that the safety of the hatchlings is our top priority and obey minimum distance rules. We’re really excited, we’re filming with Allison Argent and Silver Scale again, they’re always a ton of fun, and we’d love you to come swim with us after the hatching. See you there,_ peace!” He flips an absurd looking hand sign and walks off camera, the video goes black.

Derek leans back in his chair. Two weeks...Florida isn’t too much of a hike. Maybe it’d be a good idea to talk to Stiles face-to-face before they get into the water together. Anyway, Laura loves turtles.

He disconnects the wifi and closes the laptop, then he makes for the foredeck to see his sister about a merman.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note:
> 
> This is a wildlife chapter more than a mermaid chapter, but we can start with Stiles' tails.
> 
> If I had any artistic talents at all I'd draw this, but I don't, so...
> 
> In the promo video, Stiles is wearing one of his most popular performance tails, which is black and speckled like a spotted eagle ray: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_eagle_ray
> 
> Both Stiles and Lydia like to draw on existing sealife for inspiration when they make tails. What I love about Stiles' new tail is that the tail extender makes it possible to swim more like a whale or a dolphin, so I gave it a design similar to my favorite dolphin species, the common dolphin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_dolphin
> 
> Just make the gray bluer and the tan yellower for dramatic effect. 
> 
> Derek, to me, pairs perfectly with sharks where Stiles is more of a dolphin guy. That's why I gave him Telulah to hang out with this chapter. 
> 
> Sharks are a favorite of mine. Their undeserved negative reputation combined with the exotic meat market have led to rapidly dwindling numbers due to overfishing and mass culling, despite shark attacks being responsible for about half a dozen deaths statistically per year. Telulah the blue shark hunts primarily small prey, usually lobster and cuttlefish. Derek is diving in a wreck which has had time to grow an ecosystem capable of supporting Telulah's usual prey, which means she'll have no interest in a big, flailing human who doesn't look anything like a lobster even if she squints, and Derek is an experienced diver with experience around sharks, and is perfectly safe.
> 
> If Telulah were a bull shark, on the other hand, Derek would probably be more cautious. Bull sharks are the most aggressive shark species, with the unfortunate ability to adapt from salt water to fresh water, which means they can and do swim out of the ocean and into rivers which lead to populated areas (some have swum up the Mississippi as far as Illinois). Bull sharks are much smaller than the more famous great whites, and they're not responsible for as many fatal attacks, but they're more dangerous due to their closer proximity, and responsible for a large portion of sharks in general being seen as threats to human safety.
> 
> Easily the most famous sharks, the great white, don't often interact with humans outside of very specific, very desperate circumstances. They have a remarkable evolutionary trait for actually leaping out of the water to catch prey, usually sea birds or seals, which looks a lot like an extreme version of whales breaching. Great whites can catch some serious air when they leap, hurling all 21 feet of their bodies out of the water. 
> 
> If you are going to swim with a shark, I suggest my favorite: the whale shark. Despite being the largest shark alive, whale sharks are filter feeders, a little like baleen whales, and eat tiny krill (itty bitty shrimp). They're among the gentlest ocean species, with beautiful speckled brown skin. In fact, here's a video of professional mermaid Hannah Fraser swimming with some: 
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0NLPYMxqRk


End file.
